


A Slow Kind Of Remembering

by LGold



Category: Bletchley Circle
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-16
Updated: 2013-01-16
Packaged: 2017-11-25 18:00:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/641520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LGold/pseuds/LGold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucy takes stock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Slow Kind Of Remembering

It was a normal day, the second time that Lucy wished she were different – wished it was someone else with the memory that never mislaid a hair pin and had sent Allied armies marching to ambush the Germans. A normal day, with normal errands to a normal grocery store.

Still bruises on Lucy’s face, but it is not difficult to cover up bruises, not after a little practice. Millie had offered to go instead, but Millie had work, no matter how disparagingly she spoke of it. Besides, Lucy was beginning to feel a little trapped in the apartment: welcoming, a haven, but too full of another woman’s memories. It set her off-balance.

The grocery store was two bus rides from her old house. Harry never went out to get his own groceries, anyway. There would be no problems, Lucy told herself, and _bread, butter, meat_ , the repetition of the shopping list necessary only as a distraction. The girl at the counter had clearly gotten up in a hurry that morning _,_ strands of hair escaping her bun, bright lipstick smudged a little onto her cheek. _Bread, butter, meat._ No problems.

It was a cold morning. That was probably why the girl’s face was white under the scarlet lipstick, why the dark of her hair was ruffled and _Lucy, are you seeing this?_ Cigarettes crushed into the floor, bruises on pale skin, a smear of sharp red lipstick or was it blood on a dead girl’s face-

Afterwards, onlookers said she’d screamed before she fell. Lucy knew that she had screamed again, when she’d opened her eyes to a pool of blood by her head. It was the meat ration’s, not hers, they said. They said that she must lead a charmed life, that she had been incredibly lucky, the poor darling. Lucy had thought, _no_.

The first time that Lucy wished she was different was also the first time she knew she’d been wrong to trust her memories. Harry had been a sweet boy and a quiet boy before he left for France. If she hadn’t known that boy, the man glowering at her across a plate of overcooked dinner would merely have been terrifying. As it was, frames of a gangly boy with a shy smile and freshly-picked flowers when he called on Fridays were always in her mind. His ghost hovered over the deliberate thump of a stranger’s footsteps, and the slow turn of a head, and the drawing back of a fist.

What could change a man so completely? Once, she had wondered about it often. Nowadays, though, she thinks of Harry, and – _he was trapped in the rubble, in the dark_ – she cannot help but think of Crowley. One more inescapable memory, entwined with the rest. One more layer of fear.

That situation, Jean insists on calling it, as if referring to it any more specifically could somehow wreak further havoc with their lives. Lucy privately thinks it changed Jean for the better. She had always had that tacit knowledge of contacts, connections, information available and the routes necessary to obtain it, but now Lucy sees a new willingness to wield the knowledge as power.

It changed them all, and Lucy isn’t the only one to notice. Susan seems to be perfectly occupied with her family, says Millie, somewhat acidly and on more than one occasion. It’s true. The reforming of the Bletchley Circle and all its attendant distractions haven’t stopped Susan from spending more time with Timothy and with the children than ever before. Given how that situation might have ended, it’s hardly a surprise. The bright flicker of pure happiness on Susan’s face at the sound of a child’s voice, though, that is something Lucy doesn’t remember from BC. (Before Crowley – Millie’s own unsurprisingly blasé term for the events leading up to that awful moment in a basement with a gun and a trap and the sickening thought that they were too late, too late.) Something new, or maybe something old renewed.

And Millie herself, eternally brave, unphased as much by the search for a murderer as by putting a bullet through him. Millie, who Lucy knows would never admit to having been lonely as hell. Lucy, however, knows she was, remembers it in a thousand details. Too hopeful an expression on inviting the other women in, too much disappointment on watching them leave. Postcards freshly and haphazardly pinned in plain view, only feet from their dusty packet: a gesture of defiance, of _I didn’t need you_ that could only have been made by one who desperately did. Millie was never made to be solitary.

(Maybe it was Jean who taught her that information isn’t always to be acted on, that sometimes it is better to hide what you know. In any case Lucy knows, somehow, not to ask Millie how she can be so brave in every area but this one. Not to wonder aloud how Susan can be so good at patterns and yet miss the links between an unnecessary brush of the hand, a too-curt greeting to Timothy, a too-long glance in her direction.)

Has Lucy changed? Maybe. Maybe, when her memory tricks her that it is Harry’s shape in bed by her side for a frozen moment that is shorter every morning, and sometimes doesn’t come at all. When her memory has saved lives again, and the danger in the dark is there but defeatable, and Lucy no longer wishes she were different.

Once, years ago, _extraordinary_ was something to cling to – very few memories get lost for Lucy, but somehow that one did. Maybe, now it has finally returned, it will turn out to be the one thing that doesn’t change.


End file.
